This is Amelia Rayno's third season on the Gophers men's basketball beat. She learned college basketball in North Carolina (Go Tar Heels!), where fanhood is not an option. In 2010, she joined the Star Tribune after graduating from Boston's Emerson College, which sadly had no exciting D-I college hoops to latch onto. Amelia has also worked on the sports desk at the Boston Globe and interned at the Detroit News.

Tyus Jones update

Caught up with big-time Minnesota recruit and No. 2 national prospect Tyus Jones the other day about where he stands in the recruiting mayhem.

Some notes:

No, his phone has not been ringing off the hook since June 15th, when coaches could start calling and texting him an unlimited number of times. But that’s because Jones contacted most of the schools who had shown interest and “basically communicated with them that they don’t need to call or text me an unreasonable amount,” he said. “We know how they feel about me and certain things like that.”

Add these to the list of schools showing heavy interest: North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Indiana, Stanford and Georgetown.

Jones will be unofficially visiting Duke and North Carolina in October. His other unofficial visits have been: Minnesota, Ohio State, Michigan State and Baylor. He doesn’t have any others planned but said he wanted to do as many as he could before the official period starts (January) so he can pick his allotted five wisely.

Jones said no particular school has recruited him the “hardest” -- that so far everyone is pursuing him pretty equally.

He won’t say how many will be on the list, but sometime before the high school basketball season starts, Jones plans to start narrowing the cache of interested schools, he said, and go from there.

Jones said he talked with Minnesota coach Tubby Smith and assistant coaches Ron Jirsa and Vince Taylor throughout the summer. “Mostly they’re just checking in and seeing how I’m doing,” he said. “They don’t want to keep me for too long or hold me up for how long. Or if it’s after one of the tournaments that they saw me at, just telling me what they saw over the weekend and stuff like that.”

Chicago’s Jahlil Okafor and Jones are still planning on trying to go to the same school, Jones said. So far the colleges that have offered them both are: Minnesota, Baylor, Duke, Ohio State, North Carolina, Nebraska, Arizona and Michigan State.